Goldberg: Holder's 9/11 Trials a 'Travesty'

Conservative syndicated columnist Jonah Goldberg tells Newsmax.TV that sending Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his cohorts to a civilian trial in New York is a travesty on many levels.

“This sort of decision is kind of a piñata,” Goldberg told Newsmax.TV’s Kathleen Walter. “You can bash it from any angle and get a reward. I think the fundamental problem with it -- from which everything else flows -- is that there is no way to get around the fact that it is a decision that you would make -- if you didn’t think we were at war.”

This is a problem that the Obama Administration is all too conscious of, Goldberg said.

“You can see how self conscious and defensive the administration is about this, where Eric Holder has to say over and over again, ‘I know we are at war. I know we are at war.’ And that’s because that criticism is stinging.

“The simple fact is that if we are at war, we wouldn’t do this,” Goldberg argues. “And if we are not at war, what we are doing – not just with these trials? We are killing people and kidnapping people in Pakistan and Afghanistan. And if we are not at war that’s murder and kidnapping.”

Goldberg opines that Sen. Lindsey Graham had it right in his grilling of Eric Holder on Capitol Hill.

“We have never taken an enemy combatant during a war and put them in a civilian court. And the idea that we should start that now, to me is lunacy.”

Not that the N.Y. Times bestselling author is putting the whole crisis off on the Attorney General.

“The assumption here is that even if Holder weren’t Attorney General, we would still have these policies. I think this is one of the great deceptions of -- and then just flat out dishonesties -- that Obama is claiming that Eric Holder has made all of these decisions and that this is, ‘Oh, this was just the Attorney General.’

“That’s impossible,” said Goldberg, author of the best-selling “Liberal Fascism.” “And even - and I don’t believe in for a second. I think that this has been in the cards from the beginning. Obama has wanted to do this from the beginning. He tipped his hat that he was going to do this from the beginning.

“But even if that claim is true, it’s still nonsense because he is the Commander in Chief. And the Commander in Chief has decided that these enemy combatants, these terrorists -- who are not signatories to the Geneva Convention, who attacked us in a ghastly fashion -- should be handled by the cops and the prosecutors and not by the military,” he concludes.

Sound the Retreat

“I honestly don’t know how you can view it any other way than a retreat from the war on terror,” Goldberg says. “It is a fundamental first-principled disagreement about the nature of the conflict that we are fighting. And the idea that we are going to turn, you know, the war on terror into a bunch of episodes of, you know, Kabul CSI, where people are taking forensic evidence in Helmand Province, is just - is crazy.”

Goldberg thinks that whatever makes Obama tick, it flows deep and strong. “He just has a visceral dislike for talking about terrorism. He has a visceral dislike for saying unpleasant truths about Islam.”

He sees a fundamental difference with predecessor George W. Bush. “We always knew with George Bush that even though he was saying Islam means peace and was legitimately and rightly reaching out to Islamic moderates – the few that he could find and all the rest – that he wanted to fight a war. You get no such reassurance from Barack Obama.”

Goldberg inventories the illogical morass of the decision to bring the war criminals to New York City and a federal Article Three court.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed said that he wanted to plead guilty to a military tribunal and get the death penalty. He already said that. So the idea that Holder is trying to forward, that somehow putting them in the civilian court would yield better results or be more guaranteed a victory, is lunacy.

Eric Holder and the President of the United States are not rejecting military tribunals. They are still using military tribunals. This is why this thing is as well travesty from so many levels. They are still using military tribunals for the guys who attacked the Cole and those kinds of terrorist attacks – the upshot of this being that if you attack an aircraft carrier or a destroyer in the Persian Gulf, you get a military tribunal.

If you slaughter passengers on an airplane with box cutters to their throats and slam a plane into the World Trade Center, killing thousands of civilian innocents in - on the homeland, then you are treated like an American citizen and getting vastly more protections, more rights, more opportunities to spout your ideology in front of cameras than you would have if you had done this thing in the Persian Gulf. That is perverse and, to me, indefensible.

Goldberg confesses that he used to think it was more probable that Obama had this really well-formulated ideological agenda that he wasn’t being honest about. He has amended his thinking, he says. “I am moving increasingly towards the incompetent argument.”

“And I think that in many ways a lot of his positions are the result of him really not thinking through things and thinking everything was going to be easy,” the columnist concludes. “Barack Obama keeps saying over and over again, ‘I never said this was going to be easy. I never said this was going to be easy’ And I think he says that because he thought it was going to be easy. And he is screwing up, and he doesn’t really understand why or how.”

When it comes to the issues of Iran and North Korea the editor-at-large of The National Review shows no enthusiasm over the Obama policies.

“The administration – very much like the Europeans – has this idea that we just need - that means we just need to talk more,” he explains. “I mean that’s sort of battered wife syndrome stuff. And I fear that despite it being pretty clear to me that the only thing that makes sense is a hard line – and that doesn’t mean that’s an easy thing to do, but it’s an easy decision to make – it seems to me that things will only have to get a lot worse with both of those countries before they get better.”

“Afghanistan, you know, it’s a harder call,” he concedes. “I think we need to win. And I think that’s the only viable political solution…”

Conservative syndicated columnist Jonah Goldbergtells Newsmax.TV that sending Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his cohorts to a civilian trial in New York is a travesty on many levels. “This sort of decision is kind of a piñata,” Goldberg told Newsmax.TV’s Kathleen Walter. “You...